Comprehension across Application Domains and Languages

This work demonstrates that our natural language understanding framework can be applied across application domains and languages with ease. Approaches towards language understanding generally involve much handcrafting, e.g. in writing grammars or annotating corpora, hence portability is a desirable trait in the development of language understanding systems. Our framework for natural language understanding couples semantic tagging with Belief Networks for communicative goal inference, and has delivered promising results in the ATIS (Air Travel Information Systems) domain. This work applies the approach to the stocks domain. Furthermore, the approach is extended to Chinese, to support a biliteral / trilingual (English with two Chinese dialects) spoken dialog system known as ISIS. We introduce the transformationbased parsing technique for language understanding, and found that it is effective in disambiguating among the various kinds of numeric expressions prevalent in the stocks domain, as well as infer possible semantic categories for out-of-vocabulary words. The nonterminal categories produced by parsing are fed to Belief Networks trained on English or Chinese queries for inferring the user’s communicative goal. Our experiments gave a goal identification performance of 94% and 93% for Chinese and English respectively.